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Speaking of a head full of words ...

Sometimes while resting, by brain feeds me word exercises.  Apparently, relaxation is not an option in there.  So I roll with it.  I will often do word unscrambles in my head: mostly 4 or 5 letter words, so if I see one of those in a puzzle, I can rattle off all the words within it.

A different exercise which is good not just for unscramblers, but also for Scrabble (and related apps), is to pick the end of a word and run from A to Z finding all valid words.  So, for "-AR", it would go like this, with real words in uppercase:

BAR CAR dar EAR FAR GAR har iar JAR kar lar MAR nar OAR PAR rar sar TAR uar var WAR xar yar zar.  

It's funny how the mind spins off related items along the way.  I would almost certainly hear CHAR and TSAR in between the 3-letter words, and would probably insert BRA after BAR since it uses the same letters.  The word assocation throws all kinds of things at me, as it decides which combinations qualify as "real words".  Dhar is a state of India that had a few of its own stamps once.  And ".rar" was a compressed file format like ".zip".  And programmers use "var" all the time.

Maybe my next bit of fun would be to add an E at the end and include variations, so it would be:

BARE/BEAR CARE DARE/DEAR eare FARE/FEAR gare/GEAR HARE/HEAR iare jare kare lare/LEAR* MARE nare/NEAR oare PARE/PEAR RARE/REAR sare/SEAR TARE/TEAR uare vare WARE/WEAR xare YARE*/YEAR zare.  * some online dictionaries accept these

I might even visualize the -EER versions, so BEER, DEER, JEER, LEER, MERE (sure brain, why not?), PEER, SEER, VEER, WEIR (sure, it rhymes)

Sometimes I get stuck in these loops for a half hour.

It's a fairly "relaxing" exercise.  

Other times, I run through powers of two until I hit a wall, to make sure my math brain is still there.

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 , 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576, 2097152, and then I start to bog down.  I really should be able to carry some numbers in my head, and digits fade as I start to play with them.  I used to be able to get a few exponents further along, but not many.

I like the word exercises better these days.  And if I do play an unscarmbler puzzle, I like to do the words in batches.  There's an "-AY" so play the consonants: maybe CAY, DAY, LAY, RAY.   Then do the "-AR" words that are available with the letters shown.  Then usually two-letter prefixes for the same, so CLAY, DRAY, and so on. 



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